Overall I thought the book was pretty good, definitely worth a read. I would recommend it to everyone out there especially anyone who has the nagging feeling that there must be more to life than the normal life that seems to be forced upon you.

There is some common ground with The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss as this book also tackles the idea of living the life you want but instead on focusing on how to reduce your time spent working on stuff you may not enjoy the focus is on doing what you really love, working harder than before but on stuff that you really enjoy…

In other words the book helps you create, or at least helps you realise that it is possible to create, your ideal lifestyle based around something you are really passionate about.

At the start of the year I set myself a list of goals to try and achieve in 2011. As we have now passed the half way mark in the year I am going through my list and looking at the progress of each item.

This is a follow on post from Part 1 so you might want to read that one first. This post covers the remaining categories which are Self Improvement, Finances, Photography and Travel.

Overall I am very pleased with my progress so far. It really does help to have some goals to aim for. I wonder how many of these things I would have achieved it I had just pottered along aimlessly as I was doing before…

My last Monthly Review was back in March. I explained that I was going to try writing less frequent reviews in the hope of tackling some of the larger items on my list of Yearly Goals.

So now we’ve reached the mid way point in the year it’s time to sit down and work out how I’m doing so far. I’m going to go through each point in turn and update my progress on each one. This post got a bit too big to put out all in one go so I have decided to split it into 2 posts.

This first part covers the first three sections, Friends & Family, Business and Health & Fitness. Then on Tuesday I am going to post the rest.

I know this is a bit of a break from the usual Friday but I have decided to try and change my posting day to a Tuesday instead from now on. Fridays are always a little bit busy, making sure everything is wrapped up before the weekend so I thought I would try something new.

After a chat with a good friend of mine I have realised that sometimes I am spending far too much on this blog! Some of the posts have taken me a whole day to write…

That was fine when I was working in the 9–5 lifestyle as I had some time to kill in the mornings anyway… Right now though I am trying to get my business off the ground and so I should be spending more quality time creating…

Time management is still proving something of a challenge but I can see drastic improvements recently. The trick was to reduce what I am trying to do. The simpler the list of jobs you have to do the easier it is to concentrate on them one at a time and get some good quality work done.

Don’t panic I still plan on posting every week but I am giving myself a much stricter time frame to get each post done. One thing that is going to change though are these monthly reviews. Read on for details…

This month I was redecorating my whole office. This took a lot longer than planned and the job isn’t completely done yet!

Add to that the fact that this is a short month and I was on holiday at the start of my working month so I also had some time to make up on the contracting side of my work. All in all this didn’t leave me with too much time on my hands to begin with…

Not sure about you but I gave up on New Year Resolutions a while ago as they usually only seem to last for a few weeks before they are completely forgotten about. That’s not to say I have never had a successful resolution!

The problem is that it is too easy to fall off the bandwagon and just think, “Oh well, there’s always next year!”

To really make a go of things the minute you catch yourself slipping off the path you need to address it and try and right the problem before you go back to square one. At least that way you are making a steady progression in the right direction.

As one year ends another begins. What better time to look back on the year that has just finished and look forward to the year that has just started?

The monthly reviews I do have been very helpful but as they only cover a period of a month there are some goals that are just not appropriate. So I decided that I would take some time to review how I got on in 2010 and set out some targets for 2011.

First things first though:

Happy New Year.
I hope 2011 brings you good health and an abundance of happiness.

Well Christmas has been and gone. I had a lovely time surrounded by family and received lots of wonderful gifts. I couldn’t have asked for more…

Now it is time to look forward to the year ahead. With the celebrations tonight we see in the start of another year. What are your plans for 2011?

First off lets look at how I did against last months goals. Luckily I didn’t set myself too much this month…

I have done some work on the product specifications for my first real project. I didn’t manage to finish the spec though! As for the experiments with working hours then I am getting experience all the time but I decided that it was more important to keep plugging away for now.

Time to go into a bit more detail and plan out my goals for the coming month…